Summary of GNAW activity from a personal point of view

Friday May 02, 2003 20:37

by Ant - GNAW

I recently volunteered to give my first public talk last Wednesday. The talk was to act as an introduction to GNAW and give a summary of its activities over the past year.

Firstly, thank you all for coming along. I'm especially delighted to welcome Mary Kelly and Catholic Worker. Without doubt, they have made the biggest sacrifice of us all in the Irish anti-war effort. In my opinion, they put the rest of us to shame.

I'll start off with a brief description of how GNAW operates and how it started.
Although I wasn't involved at the time, the idea of a direct action demonstration in Shannon against the coming war was mooted at the Grassroots Gathering in Belfast in November of last year. Various people around the country got together to organise the demonstration which took place on December 8th.

At the time, there were already a few anti-war groups active in the country. However, none of them were organising for direct action and the Grassroots decided to fill that gap. After Dec. 8th, the various people stayed active as a group and they eventually became known as the Grassroots Network Against War. The word 'Network' is used because, as an entity, there is no defined membership of GNAW. It is basically a coalition of local groups around the country who are organised in a libertarian fashion and who are willing to use direct action as a tactic.

It's probably worth mentioning that we in GNAW are not opposed to marches and other types of campaigning. On the contrary, most of us would argue for diversity in tactics. Different tactics suit different people and different situations. eg. Someone who is new to campaigning is unlikely to be comfortable with anything more serious than a march.

I myself wasn't completely won over to the idea of Direct Action at first. I attended the demonstration in Shannon on December 8th but didn't try to engage in any DA as there was no plan with fixed objectives. I thought that it was worthwhile to just go and march as at the time, the general public (and most of my friends) did not realise that refuelling was taking place on Irish soil.

In early 2003, the peace camp opened and the media suddenly realised that there was a story here. On January 18th, I marched at a Shannon protest organised by the IAWM which had roughly 3000 people in attendance. At that stage, I thought that the issue had been well and truly highlighted. Nobody in Ireland had any excuse to be ignorant of Shannon's use by the US military.

Then after the actions of Mary Kelly and Catholic Worker 5, World Airlines pulled out of Shannon and the army was ordered to reinforce the police at the airport. It showed that the US military cared about the security of Shannon as a refuelling facility for their planes and that the direct actions of a few people had achieved the only concrete result of the anti-war campaign.

It was then that I was won over by the effectiveness of direct action. But since then I have also come to value the principle of direct action as being more empowering.

So in late January, I started to attend the Grassroots meetings in Dublin. What appealed to me about the Grassroots network is that you don't need to be a member of an NGO or political organisation in order to have a say in what decisions are made or how they are to be carried out.

Obviously, the highlight of the Grassroots campaign was the planned mass direct action on March 1st. I won't go into the details as I'm sure that everyone here is aware of both the plan itself and what transpired on the day. Even with hindsight, I still think that it was a good plan but it also showed up both our own weaknesses and how reactionary the rest of the anti-war movement was towards the idea of a planned direct action.

At the time, there was a window of opportunity to really strike an effective blow before war started in early March. Nobody else was grabbing that window but what surprised me was the way other anti-war groups actively undermined our carefully thought out and openly publicised plan. In my opinion, this completely negated the chance of getting a small fraction of the 100,000 who had marched on Feb 15th to do something effective. At the time, it was reasonable to assume that a small percentage of those who had marched on Feb 15 and seen how the government was ignoring them would be willing to engage in DA. The more people that participated in our plan, the less risk there was to the individual. If even a small fraction of the 100,000 had decided to join in on March 1st, it would have had a good chance of success.

Although new to this kind of activity, the way other groups actively undermined the action shocked me. I would have thought that you didn't have to be in complete agreement with an idea to say that you don't agree with it but to hope that it goes well.

For our own part, our ability to succesfully organise such a large demonstrationwas stretched to the limit. Being a small group, our resources of time and energy were very limited. Also, it was logistically difficult for the various groups from around the country to meet up and decide on a plan. As a result, the final plan was only decided upon, with only a week to go.

Most importantly, this didn't give us enough time to convince the rest of the anti-war movement of the reasoning behind our plan. In particular, we made the mistake of not getting in touch directly with the other groups aside from the IAWM steering committee and perhaps also getting in touch with some of the local IAWM groups.

On the day itself, although heartened by the number of people willing to join the white flags, we knew we couldn't succeed with the numbers we had. Our next biggest downfall was the lack of a structure by which decisions could be made quickly on the day itself. The result was that a few people went home feeling both disappointed and disillusioned.

Since then, Dublin GNAW members have taken part in the numerous marches both in Dublin and in Shannon. We also participated in the blockading of the Dail, picketed Top Oil (who supply the fuel in Shannon) and some people have used graffiti to remind our collaborating leaders that they have blood on their hands.

A few weeks ago we had been considering another large demonstration in Shannon but now the "shock and awe" campaign is over and the TV cameras have moved on. People's enthusiasm and interest in this stage of the war has waned and we feel that it would be very difficult to mobilise large numbers, despite the fact that Ireland is still participating in this war of occupation.

Also the tactics which have been succesful in the past no longer seem to be effective. The media have lost interest (roll on SARS) and even though 2 members of Catholic Worker managed to breach airport security for a number of hours on Good Friday, the charter airlines still felt that it was safe enough to return to Shannon.

Recent demonstrations at Shannon have pretty much been neutralised in their ability to disrupt the normal commercial activity of the airport. The state has shown itself willing to spend both huge sums of money and a lot of Garda overtime to protect both the airport business and the fence, which has now attained symbolic status. The planes continue to land and the plane-spotters continue to be harassed by the forces of the state.
The only thing we effectively do is make the cost of securing Shannon as high as possible.

No doubt this war will continue and it's very likely that we'll be looking at more imperialist wars in the near future. There are many wars and tyrants throughout the world and those in the anti-war movement are often accused of being anti-American through their selectivity in opposing war. But the simple fact of the matter is that it's only the US-led wars that we in Ireland participate in. I also think it's highly unlikely that the present government will make the decision of refusing to participate in the next war.

For this particular war, we were lucky with the amount of time available to us to organise before the US attacked. I doubt that we will have 6 months in which to organise next time, so I see a lot of value in staying together as a group, to build on what we have accomplished and to continue our activities.

That leaves us with the question for tonight: Where do we go from here?